Yoshiaki Shimizu (Part 4): The Kyoto Years

In the fall of 1963, after graduating from Harvard, Shimizu traveled back to Japan to pursue his career as a painter. At the time he was twenty-seven and had not been home for ten years. Despite having been raised in Tokyo, Shimizu settled in Kyoto, which during the early 1960s was populated more by traditional craftsmen and foreign artists seeking inspiration from old Japan than by contemporary artists.

Nevertheless, there Shimizu continued to develop his artistic practice— in a studio rented out from the famous ceramicist Kawai Kanjirō—which increasingly merged the dynamic brushwork of the New York School with the coloration and organic sensibility of Nipponism.

Shimizu quickly came to the attention of other artists and critics, and he became active on the exhibition circuit, displaying his work at the Exhibition of Independents at the Kyoto Municipal Museum in 1964 and 1965. In the spring of 1965, he was the featured artist for the inaugural exhibition of the Fran-Nell Gallery in Tokyo.

Established by the American artist Frances Blakemore (1906-1997) and others at the Tokyo Hilton Hotel, the Fran-Nell Gallery showcased a dynamic array of emerging artists and would eventually boast a large overseas clientele. Harvard historian Edwin O. Reischauer, then serving as U.S. Ambassador to Japan and a mentor to Shimizu, visited his Fran-Nell exhibition.

The works that Shimizu displayed on this occasion demonstrate an increasingly calligraphic nature, close-knit structure, and ability to flash an expansive notion of space despite their small canvas size. During his stay in Kyoto (1963-1967) Shimizu interacted with a vibrant community of expatriate artists and intellectuals, including the printmakers Clifton Karhu and Bill Paden and the poet Gary Snyder. Among his close associates was John M. Rosenfield, who would soon be appointed professor of Japanese art at Harvard, and Money Hickman, the future Curator of Japanese Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Shimizu recalled that despite his busy exhibition schedule, he gradually became disillusioned with what he perceived were the limited possibilities for abstract painting in Japan at the time and grew more attracted to the study of East Asian art. In 1967, he would leave behind his painting career and return to the U.S. to enter an MA program in East Asian art at the University of Kansas.

From then on, while pursuing a career as an art historian, Shimizu occasionally returned to painting. These later canvases convey the long gestation of the artistic ideas that had matured during his Kyoto years. Although the works use different media, including pastels, Conté crayon, charcoal, or watercolors, they manifest a similar approach of giving color, medium, and brushwork equal roles in the structuring of pictorial space, of what the Shimizu calls “painting from the outside in.”

Visually they convey a sense of slow, inexorable movement and constitute a form of incessant striving without end. This spirit of perpetual pictorial query is perhaps best captured in the large oil painting “Irresolution.”

The rich relentlessness of these late canvases suggests what might have been had Shimizu decided to continue as a painter. But they also offer a pretext for further reflection on his turn from art to art history. Their incessant determination to explore the axioms of abstraction underscores the degree to which Shimizu was passionate about painting. He loved everything about it: the concentration, the risk-taking, the successes and failures, the lifestyle, the social milieu, the sheer physicality, the “smell of paint.”

And it was through painting that Shimizu was able to situate himself throughout his many habitats: as a student, a foreigner, an American, an individual.

In this regard, his surviving canvases suggest a complex relationship between his single-minded pursuit of painting and the circumstances of abstract painting in the 1950s and 1960s. Even though he was associated for a time with Nipponism, Shimizu’s engagement with this group of painters was marked by ambivalence. He would eventually come to the realization that beyond country of origin, he in fact held little in common with his fellow Japanese painters. His trajectory differed considerably, as Shimizu was much younger and never had an artistic career in Japan. His artistic formation took place almost entirely within the United States, and his points of cultural reference were centered much more around German modernists than historical Japanese artists such as Sesshū and Kōrin. Shimizu never belonged, as Dore Ashton described Noguchi, to a “tradition of unresolved dualities.”

In terms of sensibility and painterly aspirations, Shimizu was instinctively more drawn to the dense structure and aggressive, penetrating brushwork of de Kooning and Sanders, which would eventually become more resonant models for his own practice. Although he embraced Abstract Expressionism, Shimizu was situated outside of the national and cultural constructions being promoted by American critics at the time, which in any case were beginning to wane by the late 1950s.

In this discursive environment, Abstract Expressionism was framed as a distinctly American art, practiced by quintessentially American painters. The ideal embodiment of this image was Jackson Pollock, who was cast in a veritable James Dean-like mold: quiet, rugged, intense, a man of action. Bert Winther-Tamaki has argued convincingly for the “subtle role of Japanese Otherness” in this formulation, but one might say that Shimizu was uninterested in playing along. In this regard, it is intriguing to observe the kinship Shimizu felt with Sanders, a Dutch painter active in New York at the time; he no doubt identified with what he perceived to be Sanders’ cultural outsidership, especially because it was of a different register than his own. In this way, Shimizu’s coordinates in the art world are difficult to assess in accordance with the critical categories of the period; if anything, he was a Post-Nipponist painter.

Shimizu’s presence in Japan in the mid-1960s proves similarly resistant to easy categorization. Having been abroad from 1953 to 1963, Shimizu experienced a veritable Rip Van Winkle-like return, as he had been absent for a decade of transformative economic growth, urbanization, and the emergence of new patterns of daily life. This unfamiliarity extended to the contemporary art world in Japan, which at the time looked more towards Paris than New York and had been heavily conditioned by a culture of mass protest and the sociopolitical contingencies of Japan during the postwar era. There were few who practiced abstract painting of the kind Shimizu was interested in pursuing, and the concerns of Japanese artists and critics lay elsewhere. This lack of synchronicity was only exacerbated in Kyoto, where at the time there was no infrastructure for contemporary art to speak of, at least nothing that remotely resembled the gallery system or the density of artists, critics, and audiences of New York.

Instead, Shimizu associated primarily with American expatriates, a community of artists, scholars, and Zen practitioners that reflected a distinct subculture within the city, at once privileged and alternative. Perhaps it was inevitable that through this particular mix of associates, and given the circumstances of his return, Shimizu would view Japan through the lens of an interloper. Over time, his interests slowly shifted; Shimizu traveled far and wide throughout the archipelago, visiting temples, photographing sites, and taking a strong interest in folk art. These experiences would allow him to achieve the critical distance necessary to embark on yet another great voyage, this time to study the history of Japanese art.